Drifter Shows You A Meme (Patreon)

Here we are, we have finally arrived at Drifter content. I'm not going to lie to you folks, I like voicing this horrible trash man way the fuck too much. I feel like even if people think I sound nothing like him I'll keep doing Drifter posts, it's too much fun. On the Destiny streams a lot of my favorite jokes come from random Drifter bullshit. It's so funny to me, this guy's out of his fucking mind, it's great.

I'm trying to avoid saturating with TOO MUCH Destiny content, but also, the channel has always been about me doing videos largely just on whatever I've been playing lately and came up with or saw some dumb jokes about, so I'm not gonna totally shy away from whatever fun I might wanna have with the stuff either. Especially since I've gotten a LOT of really positive feedback from the Destiny community, those folks are so fucking jazzed I'm doing stuff about the game, it's so nice.

But, I try to make sure the videos might at least be a little amusing in some distant weird way even if someone doesn't know anything about Destiny. That's not a promise, I'm willing to bend or break that if I really like the bit, but I do try to keep in mind what it'll be like for someone completely out of the loop.

SO, that's the stuff about the video itself today. Now, I also posted a big comment on YT explaining what's up with the Shorts stuff there, so I'm going to copy and paste that here if you are interested. If not, don't worry, it isn't really *that* important. Here it is:

So, I want to set the record straight on Shorts. The timeline of events was that I had already been making videos that were square (I started because it felt like they were physically larger on Twitter, which was originally where I imagined my "main posting place" was and everything other platform was extra because Why Not) and under a minute (because at the time I couldn't upload longer than a minute to some platforms like TikTok and I figured I might as well keep them quick anyway for my own good). If I recall correctly, I started doing videos in this square format on May 13th, 2020.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t7Gf4aqw2d0

I came to really enjoy doing videos in the glorious resolution of 720x720, just a big fucking square, felt right for memes. I developed the belief that 1:1 is the supreme ratio, and all video should be presented in this perfect form. I would occasionally compromise when I really just couldn't make a video "work right" in that resolution, or when I wanted the video to run longer than a minute, I accepted that I would just not post it on the platforms which wouldn't accept it like that or whatever, always chose to put the """""vision""""" first (keep in mind these are shitposts we're discussing).

Then, later on in the year, September 2020 I think, a friend told me they started beta testing this new Shorts thing in India, and that I should start putting the hashtag for shorts on all my videos, because it was just another category I could have them thrown into, could only possibly benefit me. I figured eh what the hell, set it to the defaults for all uploads.

And benefit I did! YouTube introduced the Shorts Fund in late 2020, October or November I think, I had no idea about this but suddenly they emailed me with a pretty sizeable monthly payment for these fuckers which really helped me out a lot. Mind you, I don't run ads on any the videos (if you see one it might be due to a copyright claim running ads on it), but despite that, they included me in the payout for this, to try to encourage creators to use Shorts. I was like hell yeah lmao, I was already doing it for free so fuck yeah I'll take a payment for it. We're not allowed to disclose the exact amounts, but let's just say it helped a lot, though the amount did quickly diminish over the months.

I think that is partially due to my own videos just getting less views in general, which, to be clear, is totally fine with me. I always reckoned folks would eventually kinda start to be a little over the voiced memes thing - don't get me wrong, clearly a lot of folks still enjoy it, and I sure as hell still enjoy it, so I'm still pumping these suckers out. I'm addicted to shitposting I think, and the Patreon continues to make it viable for me to put as much time into it as I do. But I never really made the stuff to get as many views as possible, if that was my objective I sure as hell wouldn't have started with obscure Retro FPS characters. The Shorts Fund was just a bonus that I'm thankful for, really helped out with some stuff at the time honestly, but I never bet on it and I can manage walking away from it.

At some point, I don't know when, YouTube made Shorts really suck on Desktop. And there are some other issues too, like not being able to Chromecast them for example. They're going after this TikTok type thing, to be honest I get it, and I don't inherently hate it. I have found myself lost in the hole of YouTube shorts on my phone a lot lately, and I kinda enjoy the feature. There are a lot of creators I like on YT who are not on TikTok, and I like how batshit insane and all over the place YT content is versus the stricter """moderation""" on TikTok (so many of my videos wrongfully struck down there lmao). The smooth endless scroll of videos is fun, and there's more stuff about it which I honestly do like and see potential in.

It was my belief that my """""content"""" (I prefer to call it "nontent" because it's Not Content heheh) really does fit into the Shorts ideology. I like the idea of my silly things being in the mix of that feed, I think they really do feel *right* there, because that feed is just the absolute dumbest fucking bullshit to kill your braincells with. That's me, I think I make sense there. I think some folks will only think I was doing it for the Shorts Fund, but the money wasn't *that good* honestly, and I hope what I wrote about my history with the video format and how I kinda bumbled into Shorts will dispel some of that belief. 

My hope was that I could hold out for them to get it together and make Shorts continue to do its thing without it bogging down the default experience that most people seemingly wanted from YouTube (despite Shorts apparently having massive numbers? although my own numbers didn't really change that much at all weirdly enough? Even my occasional non-Shorts were the same viewcounts roughly. I don't get it at all lmao). Give people an option or something. As this continues to not happen, and I continue to get more and more negative feedback about my videos being classified as Shorts, I realize it's time to listen to the people and drop Shorts.

OK, so I think to myself, that's fine, I'll go take the Shorts hashtag off all my videos, or at least the last 60 or something, and don't do it going forward, it'll take some time but it's worth it if it'll make folks happy. Well, heh. Turns out if your video is square or vertical and it's under a minute, it IS a Short, you don't get a say in it. Landscape videos can't be shorts, which is why the few times you've seen those from me, they weren't Shorts. But, I still greatly prefer the square canvas.

So I found out I can't turn it off for videos that already have it, and there's no opt-out option for new ones I upload but... If I do a video that's, for example 1082 x 1080 (not *perfectly* square), it'll disqualify it from being a Short but still be a square canvas. That's what you have today, and what I plan to give you going forward.

Now, I really hate this, because it not being a perfect square actually drives me up a wall, and I really hate the idea of MOST of my videos being Shorts and then now there will be a bunch of ones that aren't, I'll probably die before I hit 1000 videos or something, it's going to be this really inconsistent thing with the whole library. Also, me fixing it this way means that if they ever DO fix it so Shorts isn't something people hate anymore, there will be at least a chunk of videos between now and then which are not Shorts, meaning the library will be even LESS consistent, and we'll probably have this awkward thing of my videos suddenly going BACK to being Shorts. I HATE it. I like things SIMPLE and I hate THINKING. And I also really try to make it so that I don't cause viewers to have to think, I just want it to be seamless and consistent for folks and not prompt them for critial thought about any of this stuff. It's supposed to just be dumb fun shitposts, plain and simple.

But, you know man, I'm just so thankful that so many folks do enjoy this shit and want me to keep doing it, and all the wonderful support I get and everything, I'm seriously the luckiest idiot on the whole planet, so if this is the worst of my problems, then god damn fuckin hallelujah. People are saying they hate the Shorts shit and want me to stop participating it, I understand where they're coming from and I know whenever I'm on Desktop I kinda feel the same way, so, I'm going to listen and stop doing Shorts. Hey man, I gave it the best shot I could and really tried to be patient with it and see where it went, but it's just not working out and I can't continue to make it the problem of the kind folks who support what I do. If they ever fix it, maybe we'll go back to Shorts with these.

Sorry, I know this is an insane amount of text for just a stupid little shitpost channel, it's fine if you didn't read it, but honestly, this is a fraction of how much I've thought about this, and how much I think about a lot of stuff with these silly little memes. I hate thinking, but I'm so god damn thankful for all the support, I don't wanna ever take it for granted, so I think, and I think, and I overthink. Normally I keep it to myself because most people don't really care (I wouldn't either tbh I prefer to just log on, see some memes and log off), but I've been seeing some pretty mean spirited comments about me in relation to this Shorts stuff, so I wanted to write a comprehensive explanation as to exactly what the fuck is going on with it so that anybody who actually gave a damn (probably like three of you) could have their fill of actual information about it.

Thanks reading all this if you did, no worries if you didn't, thank you for enjoying my very stupid work, and I am sorry for any annoyance I caused with my decision to try to stick it out with Shorts. I'm also sorry for you getting more Destiny memes but that's a shorter apology - I just can't control myself when I am enjoying a video game and have dumb jokes about it. OK, that's all, thanks again, have a nice day.